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Yet after our supposedly happy housewife and mother of two is confronted by some inexorable home truths, a chance phone call from America will change her life, forcing her to discard her illusions about men, women, and marriage and start all over again. There is even an all-knowing fortune teller who early on hints that Ria will travel and start a successful business-two things she knows are definitely not in the offing.

Maeve Binchy has long proved herself a secure hand at multiple story lines, and over the course of 500 satisfying pages she focuses on Ria her best friend, Rosemary Ryan, a beautiful, endlessly selfish career woman Gertie, the battered wife of a drunkard and several other intriguing women, each of whom has secrets not to be shared. Danny Lynch from the broken-down cottage in the back of beyond and Ria Johnson from the corner house in the big, shabby estate were not only living like gentry in a big Tara Road mansion, they were actually debating what style of dining table to buy." But for its various inhabitants, the street is to become a boulevard of dreams-some broken, others created anew. In 1982, property speculation is beginning to be a big, big thing in Dublin-and their street is very much in an up-and-coming part of town. Sometimes it is a service, both to yourself and your public, to quit when you are still at the top.Editorial Review Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 1999: Against all odds, two newlyweds manage to buy the house of their dreams. Kingsley Amis, for reasons which the serialisation of his letters is making abundantly clear, could not maintain the riotous promise of the novels he wrote in his thirties.

Others, like Mary Wesley, take up their pens at pensionable age and still write a string of bestsellers. Some, like JD Salinger with The Catcher in the Rye, write debut novels of such perfection that the rest of their writing lives are an anti-climax. Novelists hit their peaks at different ages. That anyone with the talent to write books which give as much pleasure as Ms Binchy's - her last novel, Tara Road, has recorded sales which make even Bridget Jones look like a niche taste - should offer that explanation seems somehow shocking much as it must have done to the contemporaries of the great Italian composer Rossini when he gave up the opera house in his mid-forties for much the same reason.īut her bulging bank balance may not be the whole story. "I've enough money to live off," she is said to have explained. To the surprise of the literary world and the mortification of her admirers, the best selling Irish novelist Maeve Binchy has announced that her new novel, due to be published in August, will be her last.